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From the monthly archives: May, 2018

We are pleased to present below all posts archived in 'May, 2018'. If you still can't find what you are looking for, try using the search box.

Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of history at Yale University and a specialist in modern China. She recently published her first book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2018), an examination of the exhibitionary culture of the People’s Republic between 1949 and 1976. In Curating Revolution, Ho explores different ways that exhibitions brought revolution to the masses and taught Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives about the past, present, and future to them.
The six case studies of Curating Revolution are all located in Shanghai—itself a living exhibition, a former treaty port undergoing a socialist transformation under CCP oversight, and thus the embodiment of the contrast between the pre-1949 Old Society and Mao’s New China. Visitors to Zhabei District’s Fangua Lane, for example, toured both thatch huts that had provided shelter to the area’s dwellers in the late 1940s and modern five-story apartment buildings c ...

By Daniel Knorr
G. William Skinner (1925-2008) was an anthropologist of China who taught at Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, and the University of California, Davis during his long and impressive career. President of the AAS in 1983, among Skinner’s many contributions to the field is a trio of articles that appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1964-65, in which he set out his analysis of the social and economic networks connecting marketing towns in rural China. Skinner’s insights attracted such attention among China specialists that in 1974 the AAS published his JAS articles in a single volume, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China. The book proved so popular that the association reprinted it five times over the next three decades. As Daniel Knorr explains in the short essay below, Skinner’s work remains one of the foundational texts for China studies and should be read (and re-read) by all scholars in the field.
We are currently offering copies of the sixth reprint of Mark ...

Congratulations to the AAS Members awarded fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies:
Thomas Donald Conlan (Princeton University), Karl Gerth (University of California, San Diego), Tze-Lan Deborah Sang (Michigan State University), Nicolas Tackett (University of California, Berkeley), Stacey Van Vleet (University of California, Berkeley), and Judd Kinzley (University of Wisconsin-Madison).
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AAS Member John Osburg (University of Rochester) has been named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by Carnegie Corporation of New York. As a fellow in the 31-member Class of 2018, Osburg will receive funding to pursue his research on “Spiritual Crisis and Moral Transformation in Contemporary China.”
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AAS Member Van C. Gessel (Brigham Young University) has been awarded a decoration from the Japanese government for Spring 2018, “The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon” (旭日中綬章 Kyokujitsu Chūju-shō). The citation honors Gessel for contributing to “developi ...

Since joining the AAS staff in late 2016, I’ve noticed that the question I hear most frequently from association members is “When are we going back to Hawaii?” The 2011 conference in Honolulu, a joint meeting with the International Convention of Asia Scholars, attracted over 5,000 participants and exhibitors and remains an AAS highlight for both attendees and staff.
Trust me—my Secretariat colleagues and I are just as eager to return to the Waikiki beaches as you are. But the decision of where to hold our annual conference is a complicated one and involves weighing multiple variables, not all of them obvious. For a future AAS conference to be held in Hawaii—or New York, or Austin, or any of the other locations our members ask for—a lot of stars need to come into alignment.
(I should note that the process described below only applies to our North American conference; the site selection for AAS-in-Asia depends far more on finding a strong local university to serve a ...

Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg are translators of Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals,” published by the University of Washington Press and winner of the 2018 AAS Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation.
Stephen Durrant is Professor of Chinese and Vice Provost for International Affairs at the University of Oregon; Wai-yee Li is Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University; and David Schaberg is Dean of Humanities and Professor of Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA.
To begin with, please tell us what your book is about.
This is an annotated translation of Zuozhuan (ca. 4th century BCE), a chronologically arranged text that tells of events spanning 255 years (722-468 BCE). Zuozhuan, the largest text to come to us from pre-imperial China, is a foundational text in the Chinese historical and literary tradition. Our translation includes a long introduction, extensive notes, and exegetical comments that explain how each passage s ...